If politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians, then send in the clowns.
Comedians and entertainers have taken an increasingly harsh tone in their political humor in recent months.
David Letterman and Jay Leno have been telling barbed jokes about the administration’s handling of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and elastic justifications for the Iraq war. Stand-ups are cracking wise on a rise in poll numbers for John Kerry during the week when he stopped campaigning in order to honor the memory of Ronald Reagan.
Comedians, unlike many mainstream media outlets, can–and increasingly do–express what the average citizen is thinking, says Frederick Turner, assistant professor of communications at Stanford University.
“Sometimes, information is too hard to take in all at once, and that’s one thing that comedians do in a culture–they serve as early-warning systems,” says Turner, who specializes in media and American cultural history. “They’re the clowns who can tell the truth, the clowns who can say the emperor has no clothes.”
Leading the charge is Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” hosted by Jon Stewart. It has a “huge influence on what other comedians are doing, and political leaders, the establishment and the intellectual minority are paying attention,” says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
“The Daily Show” has been broadcasting hard-hitting pieces that, though laced with humor, take leaders to task at the same time. On June 21, the program ran a June 2004 clip of Dick Cheney saying he had “absolutely not” linked 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta with Saddam Hussein’s government and then followed it with a December 2001 clip where Cheney says a meeting between Hussein and Atta was “pretty well confirmed.”
Gotcha!
Perhaps no mainstream entertainer reflects the postwar shift in tone more vividly than Letterman.
In September, in one of his most pointed jokes, the “Late Show” host said, “President Bush is asking Congress for $80 billion to rebuild Iraq. And when you make out that check, remember there are two L’s in Halliburton.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Drew Sottardi (dsottardi@tribune.com)
